What are best practices for handling PHP sessions in AJAX requests?

When making AJAX requests in PHP, it is important to ensure that session data is properly maintained and accessible. To do this, you should include the session ID in your AJAX request and reinitialize the session on the server side using this ID. This will allow you to access and update session variables as needed within your AJAX request.

// Initialize session
session_start();

// Get session ID from AJAX request
$session_id = $_POST['session_id'];

// Reinitialize session with provided ID
session_id($session_id);
session_start();

// Access and update session variables as needed
$_SESSION['user_id'] = 123;

// Send response back to client
echo json_encode(['message' => 'Session updated successfully']);